The Tension Between East and West

The Individual Spirit and the Social Structure

Schmidt Number: S-4859

On-line since: 15th August, 2012

7

The
Individual Spirit and the Social Structure

A FEW
months ago, the British Colonial Secretary remarked that the world's
centre of gravity has shifted from the Baltic and Atlantic to the
Pacific. His observation is certainly indicative of the
transformation now taking place in the social structure of the
whole world. Only now, in fact, is the world gradually
beginning, in circumstances that have arisen in the
course of centuries and have changed so significantly as
a result of the cruellest of wars, to realize the
consequences of something that has long been brewing —
the fact that not only economic and social relationships, but
the whole of human relationships throughout the world are
tending to transform themselves into a totality, a single
entity.

If
this is true, however, then the change in external economic
organization (directly determined by the conversion of world
trade into a world economy from the last third of the
nineteenth century onwards) must also be followed by a profound
spiritual transformation throughout the world, of which perhaps
only the beginnings can be discerned today.

Yet
we must also remember that, however social structures may
change throughout the world, there live within them human
beings who must reach an understanding as men if they wish to
establish a relationship with one another. Understanding
between men, however, involves trust. And trust involves a kind
of insight into the souls of others. In Western civilization to
date it has only been possible, generally speaking, to extend
our horizons slightly, to include the Continent of Europe and
its immediate colonial dependencies. A world-wide view has yet
to be found.

Starting from one or two features of the historical background,
which yet are directly reflected in man's life today, I shall
try this evening to indicate what is actually happening in this
direction. To do so, I shall first have to say something
about understanding and attempts at understanding within
Western civilization itself.

If
you listen to the way educated Englishmen speak about Europe,
about Central Europe and in particular about Germany,
which has set the tone in certain respects for so long in
Central Europe, what they say — and write in their books
— is usually something like this: With us, everything
rests on a democratic basis. The individual very largely
determines what happens in spiritual and also in economic life.
The greater part of public affairs is left to individual
initiative. But when we look across at Central Europe — I
do not want to claim that what they say is absolutely correct,
only to illustrate what is in fact a widely-held view — a
certain autocracy becomes apparent, a system of administration
by officials — very capable, of course — who
determine, from the centre of national life, the nature of
individual human relationships. There is — or was before
the war, at least — always this pointed reference to a
centralized and more or less autocratic system. If we were then
to look further East, we should have to say, following the same
line of thought: further East, we find not just autocracy, but
a kind of patriarchal autocracy. This is pervaded, not only by
the ordinances of administrators, but also by a religious
impulse: men therefore feel that what they do on earth is
actually ordained by spiritual, extra-terrestrial powers and
entities, the impulses from which are absorbed into their
feelings.

Behind this English attitude there certainly lies something of
great importance, which affects all the social structures of
the present day. We can say: the further West we go, the more
man with his whole thinking and feeling is bound up in the
affairs he has to manage. This comes out most clearly when we
look at economic affairs. In the West, what a man wishes to
accomplish in economic life he accomplishes by attention to
practical detail. He has an immediate personal relationship
with the externals of life. In Central Europe, as the
psychologically perceptive observer cannot help noticing,
things are rather different. There is a tendency towards what
the Englishman, from his standpoint, calls “academic
administration by the state:” a tendency for certain
ideas to prevail which are regarded as correct. These are
expected to shape laws and inform administrative principles,
and are set forth from the beginning in an administrative, a
political system. The individual who comes to the affairs of
actual life, even economic affairs, may look to economic
practice first of all; but he is always looking over his
shoulder at something of a juridical-political character that
belongs to one of these systems. And he regards his personal
activities as a part of such a system. The Englishman has no
inclination to think up a system of this kind; his eye is only
on the concrete details of life, not on the overall system that
imposes itself upon them.

At
this point, our attention is drawn to a historical
phenomenon that has become particularly important in very
recent times. For millions upon millions of people, the name of
Karl Marx is of extraordinary significance. The rigidly
dogmatic and formula-ridden Marxism that occupied the souls of
many millions of men like a kind of religion, fifty years
or so ago, has been modified in many ways. Yet for the broad
masses of the European proletariat, the name Marx still denotes
a prophet of social reorganization. On this occasion, I am not
concerned to demonstrate the errors of Marxism. I only want to
point to a certain aspect of Marx as a historical
phenomenon.

Marx was educated in Central Europe, in Germany, where he
absorbed a disposition towards the kind of systematization of
ideas that I have just been describing. Then, however, he went
to the West, to France and in particular to England, in order
to study concrete details of the social and economic
development of recent times. What he studied were concrete
details — for that is all that exists in the British
working-class. What he constructed from them is a system of
social organization such as only a Central European temperament
can create. And this system took root, not primarily in the
West, but in Central Europe. And we may say: the concrete
details that Marx observed in the West he shaped into a grand
systematic edifice of ideas, which his disciples have made
increasingly dogmatic and increasingly theoretical. It came to
be regarded as the ideal organization of human society as a
whole from the economic standpoint. And when its exponents had
the opportunity of realizing it in Eastern Europe, it became,
in a sense, the ideal economic and political organization
— though in fact it has not been realized to any great
extent, and even this little is gradually leading to absurdity.
The essential point, however, is that we can see quite clearly,
just with a phenomenon like this, how fundamentally the mode of
thought even in Central Europe differs from that in Western
Europe. From this, however, we must suppose that the variations
throughout the world are very much greater still, and that only
an impartial attitude, quite free of preconceptions, is capable
of gaining a conspectus of these variations.

What strikes us as diversity within the small sphere of Western
civilization must be seen today against a world
background. This is because our present-day structures,
including the social ones, are affected by world conditions as
these have developed historically in East and West, just as
they are affected by philosophical impulses, in the way I have
described here in the last few days. A similar approach will be
in place when we attempt to depict present-day social
structures.

In
so many of these, a great deal survives in a disguised form, so
that its origin is only dimly visible. What originated long ago
in the East exists side by side with what is specifically
Central European and with what is just beginning to appear in
the West as a quite new configuration. This is true of the
social structures as it was of the philosophical situation
throughout the world.

When we look across at the East — which, at some time in
the future. Western structures will have to be extended to
include — we can see in the modes of thought and
social attitudes of people today definite survivals of ancient
institutions and ancient impulses from which these arose.
Decadent as it has become in the East, everything that can
still be observed today points back to times when the Orient
was ruled by a variety of priest-theocracies. In a way possible
and appropriate to the culture of the time, their leaders
embodied in the social structures things that they felt
they had to ascertain from the spiritual worlds by means of the
old instinctive spiritual vision, as I have described in the
last few days. On the basis of historical documents, people
today describe the priestly hierarchies as ruling by teaching
the populace that all natural phenomena were inhabited by
divine and spiritual entities, and that by certain magical
operations one could gain the favour of these gods, or their
love. This is true of a later epoch of the Oriental
priest-theocracies, but it is precisely a later epoch,
when the original qualities of the Orient were already in
decline.

It
is true that, in ancient Oriental civilization, certain select
individuals sought a kind of connection with the spiritual
world which was based on things that have no charms at all for
us today. It was based on certain quite material activities of
the human body: potions that were brewed and substances that
were eaten. They regarded as a secret the fact that, by the
consumption of these potions and substances, man's normal
sensory activity is suspended, and he is taken back to times
when there was as yet no sense of purely external natural law
and when spiritual life, too, was not yet so abstract as it
later became — times when the moral and spiritual element
was still united with the physical and natural. These
priest-scholars sought to return to primeval ages in the
development of the earth itself by associating their
metabolism with certain material essences of the outside
world.

What they were actually asserting we again become capable of
understanding when, by the quite different modern path into
super-sensible worlds, we come to know what I expounded in my
fifth lecture: that through spiritual insight into his own
nature man experiences within himself a kind of world-memory.
He thus goes back, in his spiritual vision of course, to times
when for men natural laws were not as they are today —
expressing themselves more or less by chance — and
spiritual laws were not so abstract as they are today. In
consequence, spiritual vision arrives, not at the purely
mechanistic Kant-Laplace nebula, but at an origin of the earth
that is to be interpreted physically and spiritually. As I have
demonstrated in the last few days, the world-memory men gain in
this way is achieved entirely without manipulating the
physical, in a spiritual way by spiritual exercises. This was
not so in those early Oriental times, when men established
contact with the spiritual world through stimulating their
unconscious instincts by associating their metabolism with
essences of one type or another. They knew what each plant in
nature could develop from their instinctive life by a kind of
dream-like spiritualization; they knew that, if this or that
plant was eaten, the effect upon their organism was such that
they could transport themselves to a particular area of
spiritual activity. This was in fact the way in which the high
priests of the Oriental theocracies, who also had complete
power over social and political structures, originally
established contact with the spiritual world. They believed
they had thereby obtained impulses that proved to be the actual
guiding impulses for social life.

We
may say: The subsequent belief, or rather superstition, that to
this or that natural object this or that “spirit”
was linked, is already a product of cultural decadence. The
original implication was that, if we allow these natural
objects to affect us in a certain way, we shall be led to a
particular kind of spiritual being, from whom we can receive
various impulses, including social ones. Oracles, star-gazing,
everything astrological was basically a product of the decline
of these older views, towards which, however, objective science
today is already being led, if dimly as yet. Objective science
has given up seeing crude polytheism deep down in all
primitive peoples, and can now perceive a monotheism of
primitive man. In the same way, it will arrive at the outlook
that has been evolved by consideration of the historical
background and by spiritual investigations such as I have
described.

On
the one hand, therefore, there existed a complete
awareness of how impulses from extra-terrestrial nature,
from spiritual entities, manifest themselves in human nature
itself — these impulses had, after all, been
obtained by stimulating the instincts, by a spiritualization of
the instincts. Yet at the same time people could not help
attaching some importance to what displayed itself in these
instincts, which they ascribed to the particular quality of the
blood, let us say in a family with a particular
constitution. In the manifestations of this instinctive
life also, they detected social impulses sent into the world
from extra-terrestrial spheres. When decadence later set in, it
was natural, for the men who were striving for power, to take
over, quite arbitrarily, the general view that looked to this
manifestation of the instinctive life, which they sought
in blood and in what could be discovered through its
spiritualization. In this way, however, something unspiritual
and (based on blood) something patriarchal entered
Eastern life as a whole. We can only discuss this patriarchal
element, of course, by referring to what is known; but its
point of departure lies in the relations that the old
priest-rulers of the Orient sought with the spiritual world.
For this reason, all the social configurations of the Orient
are steeped in this religious element, this awareness that
divine and spiritual powers must prevail in everything on
earth, and that ultimately no man should give orders unless he
has first allowed the power of the divine word to flow into the
spirit, the soul that is to give them. Impulses initially felt
as religious, as impulses of grace from extra-terrestrial
powers, thus assumed for social life the character of
commandments. Even when, in certain Eastern civilizations, we
appear to be confronted with laws in the later sense of the
word, we soon find, when we analyse the spirit of legislation
such as that of Hammurabi, for example, that it is based on
impulses of the commandment type, which derive from what was
regarded as the commerce of the elect with the spiritual
world.

In
an increasingly attenuated form, this has survived in all the
social configurations that rest on ecclesiastical and religious
foundations. And however much these things are disguised in
social structures today, we can see, even in those left-wing
associations that rest on a religious basis, that the
ancient Oriental impulses I have described still operate in an
attenuated form. There is much in present-day social structures
that we cannot understand at all if we are not in a position to
ask: In what sense do human souls cling to such structures?
They cling to them because, in these souls' subconscious
depths, there still remain legacies of the religious
inclinations of the Orient. This is true even where the
religious views themselves have taken on quite different forms,
forms that have detached themselves from economic life,
as is the case with the religions of the West. That the effect
of Oriental religions is felt even in detailed features of
economic life could be observed in Eastern Europe right down to
the Great War.

To
understand social configurations, we must discuss the spiritual
impulses that inform them. For the description often given
these days of social structures really only relates to their
external appearance, as can be shown quite clearly by an
example such as the following.

Today, it is clear, we can only look with horror at the social
organization that is trying to establish itself in Eastern
Europe. Yet in considering what is going on there today, we
cannot help remembering what happened some eight hundred years
ago, in China. Here, quite suddenly, men sought and very
largely realized a political system that aimed at
ordering all the affairs of man, even those of an economic
nature, in every detail on behalf of the state. At this period
in China, there were government authorities that fixed prices
from week to week, authorities that laid down how the land was
to be cultivated here, there and everywhere, authorities that
provided country people with the seed for the year. At this
period in China, an attempt was made to impose a high rate of
tax on people who were particularly rich, so that gradually
their fortunes passed to the general public. Remembering all
this, we may say: the social configuration sought in Europe in
our time by certain circles was largely realized eight
hundred years ago, over a period of three decades, until the
Socialist government concerned was overthrown and its
supporters expelled from China. For thirty years, a system
persisted whose features, if we described them without
mentioning China, might very well be taken to refer to
present-day Russia.

We
can point to such things if our aim is to direct attention to
the surface features of social structures. For here we can see
that Socialism, as it is popularly understood, need not be
solely a product of our own time, but could arise eight hundred
years ago there in the Far East on quite different cultural
foundations.

Yet
if we look at the spirit of these two social structures, we
observe a significant difference. In the Chinese Socialism
there clearly survive features of the theocracy that had always
ruled over China, and does so still; in modern Russian
Socialism there is embodied an abstract thinking, culled from
natural science, which has nothing whatever to do with man's
consciousness of a connection with spiritual worlds. Things
that appear the same in their outward form are not the same
when we consider them spiritually.

Looking at human history from this standpoint, we shall find
that the particular form of the theocratic state — or
rather, theocratic social structures — lasted for a
definite period. When the Asiatic theocracies were at their
zenith, the tribes in Western and Central Europe were still in
an entirely uncivilized state. In moving over to Europe, what
was theocratic in form has gradually assumed a quite
special shape.

If
we are sufficiently unprejudiced, we can discover a
transitional form in the Platonic Utopian state. There is
certainly something here faintly reminiscent, I would say, of
the Oriental priestly hierarchies. For this reason, no doubt,
Plato wished to choose as leaders of his state those who had
become — in the Greek sense, it is true — wise men,
philosophers. Within Greek civilization, in fact, the
philosopher took the place of the Oriental priest. Yet Plato's
Utopia derives, after all, from the social outlook of his own
time, in the sense that it reproduces what was currently felt
about society; and in it we can recognize a form into which
Oriental society had already developed. No longer was a
relationship of man to super-sensible powers sought. The
religious feelings appropriate to this relationship were more
or less taken over from the Ancient East; what the Greeks
themselves evolved, however, was something that had
played no particular part in early Oriental society, and
ultimately plays no particular part even in the social
structures we meet in the Old Testament. What was now
elaborated independently was the relationship of man to
man.

We
encounter this relationship in its purest form when we look
into the life of the soul in Greece. Here, man still felt a
certain intimate association between the spiritual and the
physical in his make-up. In conscious inner life, there was for
the Greek as yet no separation of body and spirit, such as
there is for us. We look within and apprehend the mind in a
very diluted form, metaphorically speaking; so that,
comprehending it by ordinary consciousness, we can have no
conception how it activates the vigorous body or is influenced
by it. For the Greeks it was different. And that is why Goethe
longed to achieve their outlook in his own experience. The
Greeks had no such concept of body and spirit as we have. For
them, spiritual and physical were one. Not until Aristotle, a
late Greek, does the distinction begin to creep in. Although
Plato's views are often presented abstractly, the spirit in
which he spoke is one that saw the body everywhere permeated by
soul, even in its organic functions, and felt the soul to
be so powerful that it could everywhere extend its
antennae towards the physical organs. The attitude to the soul
is more physical, to the body more spiritual. Such a view is
linked at the same time, however, to a particular feeling that
grows up between men. And from this view has arisen what is
characteristic of the civilization of Central Europe.

If
we look with a sensitive eye at the felt relationship between
man and man among the Ancient Greeks, and recognize how it has
evolved from man's old relationship to the divine, we can say:
what was previously an attitude permeated by religion has
transformed itself into the legal attitude, the political
attitude. Out of this, out of a combination of the nature of
Greek and Roman, there then arose something that could maintain
itself in social configurations. The priest gradually becomes
merely the successor of the Oriental national leaders, for,
although he may have kept himself in the background, the priest
in the Orient was always the real spiritual leader, even with
Darius and Xerxes. There comes to the fore a mode of thinking
that cultivates ideas based on the relationship between
man and man. And this goes so far that even religious life is
swallowed up by this legal current, as I would call it. A
juridical element enters man's world-picture, and even the
cosmology of the time; and this element then remains almost
throughout the Middle Ages and can be detected when we study
the political views of, say, Augustine or Aquinas.
Religious impulses themselves, while remaining what they are,
take on legal forms.

This entry of legal forms into man's religious, cosmological
views is eloquently documented in the wonderful picture of the
Last Judgment that faces us as we enter the Sistine Chapel in
Rome. It is at its most monumental here in this picture in
which Christ appears as judge over all the world. His status as
judge magnificently symbolizes the transition from a purely
religious and devotional element to that conception which
permeates religious feeling with a legal element —
one that is carried over into the theory of man's world
government and guidance.

This legal element informs all the social structures of the
Middle Ages and much that persists in those of today. When we
remove the disguise, we observe the presence of this legal
element, and see how it has transmitted to us religious
impulses from ancient times. And in modem political systems,
right down to their terminology and the workings of their laws,
where these go back to the Middle Ages, we perceive how, in the
middle period of human experience and in the civilization
between East and West, this legal and logical element has made
its appearance.

We
may say: what was Oriental and theosophical changes into
something legal and logical; the sophia of the Orient
becomes the logos of the Occident; and from the
logos there develops in turn the juridical
structure, which then proceeds to reproduce itself.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the legal element also
determined social configurations. You need only study the
economic ordinances of the period: everywhere you will find
that social structures are shaped by something which is
permeated by ancient Oriental religiosity and is juridical.

Nowadays, we observe the religious element still active in the
less formal human groupings or in those that arise from
religious denominations, whereas in the major social structures
that are the nations we observe the operation of legal
thinking. We notice, however, that with the transition from
medieval to modern history the religious element allows itself
to be pushed more and more into the background, whilst the
legal one becomes increasingly predominant.

At
this stage, the legal element invades economic
configurations. What I am now describing can be traced in
all its detail in the history of Roman Law. We can see how
concepts of property, customs of ownership, and everything
economic in fact, has been decisively determined by a social
mould of this nature.

Yet
in the course of human development an independent economic
element does assert itself increasingly in the West, the nearer
we come to modern times. We can say: in earlier periods,
economic activity is completely cradled in religious and legal
forms. It is in the West that the economic element first
emancipates itself in human thinking.

You
need only examine the economic element as it presented itself
to the Phoenicians, and compare it with the economic systems of
modern times (though admittedly these are only at an early
stage in their development). You will realize the
difference: Phoenician economic life is the product of
the impulses I have described; Western economic systems have
gradually emancipated themselves from them.

Religion and law are thus joined by a third current which, at
any rate at first, tends to endow economic conditions with a
social configuration of their own. This trend derives from the
West, which in turn has adopted, to a greater or a lesser
extent, something of what originated in the East and in the
region between. We can see, for example, how, in American
civilization especially, economic conditions, unaffected by
other cultural currents, evolve along their own lines, until
trusts and syndicates emerge. We can see, too, how Western man
is inclined to attempt to separate economic from religious
life, though he is less successful in separating it from what
he later absorbed from juridical thinking and feeling. Even so,
we are clearly aware how economic configurations, in their
social aspect, are gradually struggling free of the
intellectual straightjacket that was imposed on them while they
were still under the sway of the legal element.
Increasingly, we find economic life pure and simple
attaining its emancipation. There can then evolve
categories that derive from economic life itself.

At
this point, however, we become aware of something that must
establish relationships between men and between peoples, yet
also lead to conflicts between peoples, and indeed conflicts
within nations. We perceive that, in the ancient Orient, the
religious element included the legal and economic ones; that
the legal element subsequently became more or less distinct,
but still contains the economic one, whilst the religious
element has become more independent; and that now, in the
West, an independent economic life is seeking to develop.
Perceiving this, we must also consider how the various cultural
patterns of humanity stand in relation to these currents.

And
here we may conclude that the theocratic and patriarchal
element, with its roots in the East, can really only produce
something consonant with an agrarian system, with a
social organization based principally on the cultivation
of land, on an arable economy. We thus observe a certain
correlation between agrarian life and the theocratic element.
Moreover, this has its effect on all the social structures of
more modern times. In admitting that the theocratic element
continues to inform social structures right down to our own
times, we must also realize that, because other branches of
human activity have come to the fore, they have come into
conflict with it, to the extent that in agrarianism, in
accordance with the nature of human agriculture, the theocratic
element seeks to maintain its position. The correlation exists.
A split occurs in it, however, when human activities of another
kind seek to assert themselves.

Here we may point to something that can be regarded as a
barometer for this aspect of world history. I recommend you
some time to study the Austrian parliamentary proceedings of,
say, the seventies of the last century. You can observe,
sitting in this parliament, men who believe that the old order,
with its roots in theocracy and jurisprudence, is intimately
associated with agriculture. They are faintly aware of
something that later became a great flood, the influx of
Western produce — including it is true country produce
— deriving from a mode of thought and a social order
built on a quite different branch of the economy — on
industrialism. Although this is only faintly audible in the
various parliamentary speeches, yet we can perceive precisely
here, where so much has come together and may be studied,
something that illuminates world-wide perspectives.

To
what is here developing in the West, the theocratic mode of
thought is less applicable than it is to any other branch of
the economy. What is developing is industrialism. Naturally,
land cultivation is not included in it. But land cultivation
itself is then caught up by social configurations that are
distinctly reminiscent of the tutelage of industrial
thinking.

Yet
industrial thinking today, however much it has developed its
technical structures, has still not assumed the social
structures appropriate to it. On the one hand, we can see the
correlation between the theocratic mode of thought, with its
patriarchal essence, and the agrarian system. We can see, for
example, that in Germany, right down to the present day, it has
been impossible for agrarian thinking and industrial
thinking to come to terms properly, for reasons I have
indicated. We can see this correlation, therefore; but on the
other hand we can also see how everything appertaining to
commerce is, in the last analysis, correlated with politics and
the law.

That is why, in the ancient Orient, commerce is a kind of
appendage to the patriarchal administration of human affairs.
And in the form that is socially significant for us today,
commerce really develops alongside the legal element. For
what is required between man and man in trade is something that
develops particularly in the juridical sphere. In so far
as it did develop in the Orient, the way was prepared by
certain commandments, transposed into legal terms but
definitely regarded as divine. Commerce, however, has achieved
its social organization only within the political and
legal current in human development. We can say,
therefore, that it is the commercial aspect of economic life
that has proved to be particularly suited to political systems
based on law and legal thinking.

At
the same time, it is true that — because in the whole man
everything must be connected with everything else — the
political and legal element has also linked up with the
industrial sector of economic life. As we go further and
further West, therefore, we find that, although men evolve
their personal relationship to anything chiefly from industry
and the things associated with it, yet they also take over
features of commerce. For with social structures as they are
today, any undertaking is viewed, in point of fact, in the
light of its commercial function in the social order. The
industrialist himself sees his own undertaking within a
commercial framework, so that in this way too the second
current, the legal one, maintains its influence on the economic
life of the West.

In
other present-day social structures, we can see even more
clearly how this politico-legal element continues to exert an
influence below the surface among the broad masses of the
people. As concomitants of modern technical life, all kinds of
social structures have emerged. We need only recall the trade
unions. We correctly perceive the nature of these only when we
realize that economic conditions have created them.
Nevertheless, those who see these things in a vital manner know
that, even if the unions emerge from economic conditions
— associations of metalworkers, printing trades
unions and so on — the way men behave within them, the
way they vote, the way they look at things and discuss them, is
the parliamentary, political and legal one, the administrative
way. It is something that derives from the second current I
have described. The ideas appropriate to the third current are
still in their infancy, and it still has to take its social
patterns from what is old.

At
the present time, therefore, we can see three principal types
of social configuration existing side by side, widely
differentiated of course in one direction and another.
They co-exist in such a way that, we may say, history is
deployed in space. And in adapting ourselves to any individual
social configuration — an economic association, a
political association or a religious community — we do in
fact, since each of them is in contact with the others, enter a
community where elements that have arisen successively in
history now co-exist. They have now become shuffled
together in space, and call for our understanding today, for
this is the time when mankind must regain, at a higher level,
the nai'vet^ from which creativity originally sprang.

It
was once proper that primitive economic and political life
should be poured into the theocratic mould. At a later period,
a duality developed, taking over from earlier times the
religious element, and evolving the political and legal
element, incorporating economic life. So, today, economic
life cries out for independent organization, for vital
human ideas that can operate once more in a formative manner,
as the vital impulses! of the legal forms of Greece and Rome,
and the Orient's religious impulses, once operated. Since these
three currents in human development are now mutually diverging,
however, we must be able to consider them independently.
We must look at the spiritual side of social structures,
initially the only effective one; must look at their legal
side, which became the dominant one in the Middle Ages; and
must look at their economic side, for which a spiritual aspect
must also be sought.

This has been put forward simply as a reflection on the
antecedents of present-day social structures. It is
intended to indicate that, in order to understand these
structures, we must enter with real understanding upon the
contemplation of those world-wide perspectives to which I drew
attention at the beginning of this lecture. To do so, however,
we shall have need of vital thought. That this vital thought is
needed can be seen on the one hand from the sociological tone
of my observations here; but it also emerges from direct
contemplation of contemporary life. Everywhere, people
are longing to begin to permeate economic life with the vital
thought-impulses appropriate to it.

In
this respect, of course, educated men of the West are of
peculiar interest. In an extraordinarily significant treatise
written in England in the very year before the fearful event of
the Great War, a notable Englishman pointed out how
fundamentally the English way of thinking differs from the
German one — in the sense that I indicated at the
beginning of my observations today. But he points out something
else too: what strikes him is that, within the German-speaking
population of Central Europe, there has always existed
thought. And he observes that thought is the element in
the human soul that in the most intimate way points continually
to the great enigmas. Through civilizations that
cultivate thought, as the German does, we are confronted
again and again with the deepest riddles of man and the cosmos,
even if — and here comes the tail-piece characteristic of
this man of Western Europe — even if, he says, we
perceive the futility of supposing their solution.

Well, it was proper to speak of the “vanity” of a
solution when one could only point to the thought that emerged
by abstraction from the body of law and logic; for,
although as thought it may rise to supreme heights, this still
remains a kind of dead thought. Anyone, however, who becomes
aware that in our time the souls of men can provide a
birth-place for vital thought, will speak, not perhaps of a
final solution, but of a path that can lead to our being able
to solve, at least for that particular period, the social
problems that face us at any time.

For
it is probably true that, once thinking about social
structures has appeared in human evolution, we cannot
speak of being able to solve the social problem all at once,
but must rather say that among the evolutionary impulses that
must survive into the future are included reflections about
social organization. We can say, therefore: It is true that we
shall not be able to speak of solutions, but of a vital human
thinking that in a conscious way will first perceive the goals
and in a conscious way will then move towards the solution of
the social riddles of existence.